As many Obies carried on with their usual weekend activities, recovering from parties or exploring outcrops on a geology field trip, the Science Center was buzzing with an unusual amount of activity. The arrival of the new “Beowulf Cluster” supercomputer has spawned the Oberlin Center for Computation and Modeling, and with it a very ambitious conference.

I approached the conference with the feeling that I knew what to expect from this gathering of computer know-it-alls. But what I found was a large, vibrant and nearly overwhelming professional conference on all science that focused on research with undergraduates. It was intense, to say the least.

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Dan Stinebring, the director of OCCaM, was quick to point out the success of the conference.

“The dozen or so Oberlin faculty and several dozen students who participated saw a range of first-rate Modeling Science during the conference,” he said. “Oberlin science was showcased throughout the weekend, both in our wonderful facilities and in the quality of our faculty and students.”

I ended up learning a lot at the talks I went to: the poster session and the informal talk about integrating undergraduates into research. Physicists have always expressed the world in terms of computation and modeling, now biologists and climatologists are doing the same. For instance, John Milton from the Claremont colleges began his talk “Sticks, Falls, and Golf Balls: Modeling Balance in the Nervous System” by describing the nervous system as the “original computational machine.” It makes sense that these sciences are finding it impossible to make progress without the use of huge computers for modeling processes.

In his talk, “Modeling the Atmosphere and its Complexity,” Robert Wilhelmson of the University of Illinois reminded the audience that, though expensive, these facilities are of great importance.

“Costs of these facilities are not small, yet they are crucial for us as we advance in science,” he said. “Computers have become so integral [in our lives] that most of us don’t think twice about carrying around a $2300 laptop.”

The laptop, by the way, cost $10 million in 1990. We have begun to reach the technological limit in chip size and, as Wilhelmson put it, the “issue of harnessing the power of multiple machines for multiple processors now is becoming more important.” The conference aimed to show the need for parallel clusters like the one we now have at Oberlin College.

Wilhelmson’s talk, the first of the conference, focused on the complexity of the weather. For the longest time, climatologists were content to understand factors that affected weather independently from each other. Now, they are interested in coupling the data. Our planet is warming for more complex reasons than just natural evolution. The trend we see in the data can be matched pretty well with simulations that take more reasons into account. More data requires a more powerful tool. Wilhelmson suggested that the large parallel cluster computers needed should be seriously considered at other schools, especially after our rough hurricane season and the recent tornado in Illinois.

The session on strategies came as a surprise to me. Even the younger professors (like our own Chris Martin) commented that there were significant challenges to doing real-world research at a small institution like our own, especially when compared with graduate schools. Still, most agreed that it was more fun to work at small colleges than at any larger university.

We’ve all been told that in our science classes, but how many of us have actually used more than Excel or some simple plotting program in our lower-level chemistry and biology classes? Expect any research you do to be heavily reliant on computation. Hopefully, more undergraduates can then understand the completely new world science is exploring.